Leap still exists and I think HP is going to use it in some of its laptops, I've also seen solutions that use a microphone to tell where on a surface you are tapping so that's another solution. My problem with foldable keyboards is that they almost always turn out to be tiny. I have trouble typing on anything smaller than a standard keyboard. My hands are just too big to crunch down to a tablet sized keyboard. Any solution for improved typing on phones would need to be more than a mini keyboard.

Folding keyboard: A number of years ago I read about a sensor that monitored your finger movements to create a virtual keyboard on any flat surface. I don't know how well it worked but in theory, this idea could be adapted to reference any piece of paper that contains a keyboard layout. The only unknown is where to place the sensor. Making the sensor part of head gear adds new engineering problems. Heads are not stationary. The sensor would have to track the keyboard paper and adapt -- perhaps hundreds or thousands of times per second. The sensor I read about monitored finger movements from a low angle. When monitoring finger movements from a high angle, it would be more difficult (perhaps impossible?) to determine when a finger touches the surface.

I'd like to see a folding keyboard, maybe something the size of a small pencil that can be unrolled to form a touch sensitive full-sized input device. And, when Google Glass is MUCH further along on the price curve, it can be the smartphone's viewing display. Then, we have one device that is phone, tablet, and a PC. A ComPhablit? The only thing that is still very hard to imagine is a battery for this beast that will hold an adequate amount of charge.

Voice interaction will get better, but I think it will take a long time before it surpasses touch. The think about touch is that visual icons tell the user about the expected parameters of operation. For example, an arrow is understood as a way to navigate through content. With voice, you have to know the command syntax or have some sense of the range of acceptable words. And most of us are still not that comfortable talking to machines; we haven't yet developed a standard set of patter for anything beyond basic file commands. Siri is smart enough but deviate from the path too much and she'll get stumped.

Good point, essential functions that are possible without the internet or electricity, should maintain their manual capabilities. An electronic lock is good because it enables operation from a distance, a smartphone controlled lock with a camera is better, but at the end of the day, if there is any kind of outage, the doors should still be able to be opened.

Agreed. People (especially in the tech world) seem to think that just because they think something is cool or possible, that it should be done, regardless of reality. We need dreamers to push boundaries, but we also need people with common sense who are grounded in reality to reign in the dreamers.

I first heard the idea of a flexible display that folds out to become bigger -- think origami -- in the 90's, when we were struggling to slim down laptops. It is still a good idea for mobile devices if someone can make it work.

Unless you live in Southern California (where the weather, it seems, only changes from warmer to cooler and back), you experience noreasters, tornados, hurricanes, floods, and other weather events that result in power outages. For your phone to open that door, the door lock has to be powered on. And for that you need an uninterrupted supply of power. All this cool technology being dreamed up in Silicon Valley and being dumped on us, takes no consideration of the real life. I will keep my good old door lock for now.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.